CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE JUST BEEN SELECTED TO RECEIVE $20 MILLION!

“...”

No, not really, but I’m sure we’ve all received nuisance emails like this. Normally from someone claiming to be a Nigerian prince.

Such spam emails have been rolling into my inbox, furiously, for weeks.

I’ve got no idea how my email address found its way to Nigeria, to these spammers, but clearly my email has been thrown to these modern-day grifters, and the spammers have been pouncing on my email address like it was raw meat thrown to caged lions in a zoo.

Every day, I receive several emails, usually from various purported royal family members. For some reason, the Nigerian royal family seems really excited and happy to bequeath tremendous sums of cash to a perfect stranger...

It looked so simple too. All I had to do was provide them with my full name, social security number, and bank account number, and WOW! $20 million, $10 million, $11.8 MILLION were ALL MINE!

Of course, as most of us must also know, this is a con, a swindle, a racket, a trick, a cheat, a flimflam, a hustle, a hoax, a bunco ... a low-down dirty boondoggle!

These particular spam scams have been around for ages, too, and I once saw a fascinating documentary about this phenomenon.

Being that this racket is so well known, it’s surprising that these emails still even exist. Sadly, though, some folks must still be falling for this, otherwise these emails would not still exist.

Since most of these emails originate from Nigeria, I got interested to learn a little more about the country, so I googled it, and then went down a Wikipedia wabbit hole.

In doing so, I was rather dismayed to learn that in Nigeria, homosexuality is considered a crime and that gays are often beaten, murdered, and even jailed, simply for being who they are ... What the fuck?! In the 2020s? Really?

In fact, according to Wikipedia, 14 states in Nigeria have Sharia law and carry out the death penalty for same-sex relations, death by stoning, to be exact. In other regions of Nigeria, gays can receive prison terms of up to 14 years in jail!

Coming from a country where gay marriage is legal, and where a football coach was just forced to resign, largely because of idiotic anti-gay slurs he’d used in an email, I was definitely saddened to see how much worse life is for LGBTQ in other countries, especially in Nigeria, as well as other countries in the developing world.

Which brings me back to the spamming scammers that’d been attacking my email inbox on a daily basis.

In the documentary I watched, the scammers were all men.

(And I’m not sure why. Perhaps the women there have better, more effective scams to pull, or are just smarter and better humans than these spammers... )